Could switching fonts save millions of dollars?
The tl;dr version of this story is yes! The long version, though, is fascinating.
Fourteen-year-old Suvir Mirchandani's science project could save the U.S. federal government around $400 million in printing costs annually. The best part? Those savings represent using fewer resources. They wouldn't have to print less or cut back in any way. All they'd have to do is begin using Garamond - a font that's included for free on basically any computer.
The font is nothing fancy. What Garamond has going for it are its thinner lines, which means using less ink to create each letter. When you consider that the fed prints around 2500 documents per day, that's millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of ounces of precious printer ink.
Garamond: How switching fonts could save millions
Mirchandani's science project began at the school level. He did the math and discovered that his school could save $21,000 per year by using 24 percent less printer ink. Just by changing the fonts that teachers and administrators use in their handouts. His project was so impressive that it made it into Harvard's Journal of Emerging Inventors.
Want more? Check out the video report from CNN:
image via Gael Varoquaux